Jack Dini

China's Invisible Scourge

A new study suggests air pollution is even worse than thought in China where pollution is sky-high everywhere. Some 83% of Chinese are exposed to air that, in America, would be deemed by the EPA either to be unhealthy or unhealthy for sensitive groups. Almost half of the population of China experiences levels of PM2.5 that are above America's highest threshold. Berkeley's Earth scientific director, Richard Muller, says breathing Beijing air is the equivalent of smoking almost 40 cigarettes a day. (1)

Bananas- An Uncertain Future

Bananas, the world's most popular fruit, are very, very vulnerable to a lot of diseases. And the reason for this is that the bananas we eat, called Cavendish bananas, are fundamentally clones of each other. There are no seeds. Every banana is grown basically by taking a cutting from one and turning it into another tree. So every Cavendish banana we eat is exactly the same genetically as every other one. And just like human identical twins, what afflicts one afflicts the others, reports Dan Koeppel, author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World. (1)

Thinking Twice About Salads

Americans today have a complicated relationship with food. In a climate that now includes $70-a-day juice cleanses, four gluten-free lifestyle magazines, and a 'superfoods' industry set to hit $130 billion in 2015, we're also a culture fascinated with achieving some perceived pinnacle of well-being, reports Jen Schwartz. (1)

Emissions- Humans Have Lots of Help

Scrapping all the cars, SUVs, minivans, and pickup trucks in American could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about 2%. Extinguishing the fires that burn unchecked at coal deposits around the world could reduce emissions by 2 to 3% without the economic devastation. (1)

Cooling Period Ahead?

Many people are talking about a forecast of a mini-ice age which seems to be an increasingly popular thing to predict reports Joanne Nova. (1)

Climate Science: Funding and Suppression

An inordinate proportion of government and corporate research grants have been awarded to universities the past 15 years for a single specific purpose: to prove human activities and the burning of fossil fuels are the main driving mechanisms causing global warming, reports David Dilley. (1)

Frivolous Government Funding

Washington politicians are more focused on their own political futures than the future of our country. And with no one watching over the vast bureaucracy, the problem isn't just what Washington isn't doing, but what it is doing.

Weak Wind, Less Energy

Wind turbines are extraordinarily unreliable because wind speeds are so inconsistent; the average output of a turbine is only about a quarter of its capacity (know as the 'load factor'). Also, due to the vagaries of the wind, the turbines are unpredictable. One question to ask is—what if the wind slows down, or ceases to blow at all? One example—in January 2010, Britain's wind turbines supplied virtually no power on most days. (1)

Trillions, Not Billions Of Trees

The world's great forests have long been recognized as the lungs of the earth. They fix carbon and produce oxygen. So it should come as a pleasant surprise to hear that there are over three trillion trees on earth, according to a new assessment. The figure is more than seven times as big as the previous best estimate, which counted perhaps 400 billion at most.

Food Scares and Rodent Testing

We see these startling headlines every day: Limonene in oranges causes kidney cancer in rats! Alar in apples causes cancer in mice! The sweetener saccharin causes bladder cancer in rats! These reports usually focus on a chemical present in the environment that produces cancer in a laboratory animal test with the implication that it will also cause cancer in humans. The question is—what are we to believe about the headlines making a connection between animal studies and potential effects on humans? (1)

Scientific Paper Retractions On The Rise

Retractions of scientific papers are on a steep rise. They join a string of science scandals ranging from Andrew Wakefield's study linking childhood vaccine and autism to the allegations that Marc Hauser, once a star psychology professor at Harvard, fabricated data for research on animal cognition, reports Bourree Lam. (1)

Wine Versus Beer Drinkers- Who's Healthier?

Wine drinkers live longer. Previous studies have shown that wine had significantly lowered mortality from both coronary heart disease and cancer when compared with non-wine drinkers. In fact, wine drinkers reduced their risk of death by one-third compared to non-drinkers. People who drank beer and other alcohol had a 10 percent decrease in mortality compared to non-drinkers, so this group showed beneficial effects of moderate alcohol consumption, too, though not as much as the wine drinkers. (1)

Food Flavorings and Obesity

Journalist Mark Schatzker has released a new book titled, The Dorito Effect: The Surprising Truth About Food and Flavor, which details how increasingly flavor packed junk foods like soda and chips have made regular food seem bland. (1)

California's Water Crisis

California is currently in the grip of one of the worst droughts in state history. Gov. Jerry Brown has signed an executive order that imposes water restrictions on residents, businesses, and farms across the state.

Radiation Hormesis Gets Another Look

In late June the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) announced that three petitioners, a radiation-health organization, a health physicist, and a professor of radiation oncology at the University of California, Los Angeles, asked that it amend its radiation protection standards to change the basis of those regulations from the linear-no-threshold (LNT) model to the hormesis model. The NRC explained, “The radiation hormesis model provides that exposure of the human body to low levels of ionizing radiation is beneficial and protects the human body against deleterious effects of high levels of radiation.” (1)

Pesticides From Plants

Plants do not have the option of fleeing from predators. As a consequence, they have developed an elaborate set of chemical defenses to ward off insects and other creatures that want to make them into a meal.

Chipotle—GMO and Minimum Wage Issues

What are the health risks from eating genetically modified food? There aren't any. Twenty-five years of scientific studies have shown no evidence of harm from the use of GM crops. A recent report from the European Union found that 'the main conclusion to be drawn from the efforts of more than 130 research projects, covering a period of more than 25 years of research and involving more than 500 independent research groups, is that biotechnology, and in particular GMOs, are not more risky to consume than conventional plant breeding technologies.” These findings are backed by the American Medical Association, the US National Academy of Science, and the World Health Organization—along with other respected scientific research based organizations worldwide. (1)

More On Ice Age Predictions

Solar activity is now falling more rapidly than at any time in the last 10,000 years reports Lawrence Solomon.

Silicone On Trial- An Updated History

Twenty-five years ago from this coming December marks the anniversary of the famous Connie Chung diatribe against breast implants reports Dr. Jack D. Fisher, a surgeon and professor emeritus of surgery at UC San Diego, in his new book Silicone On Trial. (1)

Trees-- The Good and Bad Regarding Pollution

Jay Lehr asks the question, what do you get when you go into the north woods, a great beautiful unspoiled area where there is no industry for miles? The answer is you inhale the pine odor. Guess what? Pine odor is made up of polycyclic aromatics, carcinogens, in the cleanest air we supposedly have in this country. (1)